Birthdays Are for Redefining
Photographer - Tobi Brun
Birthdays Are for Redefining
I stare at the names in my Snapchat contacts and idle my finger above the “create group chat” button. I am in the early stages of creating a plan to celebrate my twenty-second birthday, which is a week away, and I need to decide who I will invite to a party that has not yet been planned. As I look at the names of people I have known for years, I hesitate over whether to pull them all into a virtual room and discuss the details of a day celebrating me or if I should scrap the idea altogether. The names of these people once felt comfortable in my mouth along with the words “they are my friend,” but over the last few months, I have found a sour taste poisoning the confidence in that sentiment. It is normal to grow apart from people you were once very close with. That’s what people older than me would say. But is it normal to question if someone is your friend at all or if they ever have been? I question this after years of built-up papercuts that have turned into a gash, scarred over, but still sore.
In the past, my birthday was a sacred day, it was a day that got to be about me. People were nice to me on my birthday and that was huge to a little girl who spent most other days being picked on or excluded. Everyone wanted to come to my birthday, as I spent weeks planning the themes and details of the celebration. It didn’t matter where we went. The arcade, the waterpark, or my mom’s basement where we set up couch forts and stayed up all night. My birthdays were the most fun. Even though I had lots of people to invite to a birthday, the group of friends I grew up with were not very healthy. They talked violent amounts of gossip about one another, got into fights (sometimes physical), and played other friends against the one they were mad at, leaving them
isolated. I knew at the time, even at age eleven, that relationships like that were toxic, but I wanted to be liked, wanted to have friends, needed to have “friends” to invite to a birthday. At age eleven I felt like a friend was a person you should be loyal to no matter what, but my notion of loyalty was to allow others to walk all over me, while I provided support and companionship to those, who in hindsight, didn't even like me.
Merriam-Webster defines a “friend” as “A person who has a strong liking for and trust in another.” Strong liking. Trust. By this definition, I have only ever had one fully platonic “friend” that I had been sure liked me and who I felt mutual trust with, a girl who I no longer speak to because of her lifestyle choices involving drugs, men, and morality. I held onto her for a long time while she continually chose her lust for self-destruction, I wanted to be loyal, but you can only tell someone so many times why she shouldn't be doing hard drugs and why nothing is worth getting put in juvie before the repetition becomes exhausting.
I grew up wanting a perfect TV friendship. One where the two besties would see each other every day; and have each other's backs amidst the rumors, boy troubles, and growing pains; one where I could confidently call someone my “best friend” without awkward hesitation that I was stepping on someone else's toes. But as I've gotten older, I wonder if that wish was realistic. I called Brittany Dunham, a girl I had known for years, my best friend one time. I unintentionally did it in front of Kailee, a girl who has known Brittany since she was a toddler, but who would also call her fat and dumb behind her back. When my sentiment of our relationship slipped, Brittany stared at me with her giant blue eyes and froze, looked at Kailee’s glaring face, and said I
was “one of her best friends.”
Since the early two-thousand-tens, musician/actress Selena Gomez and country-turned-pop icon Taylor Swift have been best friends. They are often seen by the paparazzi on outings from lunches or shopping sprees, they attend one another’s events and concerts, and they almost always sit together at award shows, whispering gossip back and forth to one another. At surface level, they are what I wanted growing up, a supportive, loving sister who had my back, despite the rumors of being a poor performer and needing autotune to sound good. But as I have gotten older, I've learned that a 100% supportive friend may not be realistic, and I find it strange that they have never made a song together. Maybe a “friend” isn't someone you share everything with, whatever the reason as to why they haven't made music together, it seems like these two stars don't mix business with personal.
I read a book back in elementary school titled Friendship According to Humphrey by Bett G. Birney. The books follow a school pet hamster named Humphrey who, through wacky adventures, learns what being a “friend” means. This often involved using kind words, not discussing someone unfairly behind their back, including them in conversation and plans, and respecting them in every general sense. I wanted to have friends like Humphrey did and wanted to be a good friend.
Ashlynn, one of the names in the Snapchat contacts, told me I wasn't being a good friend a few weeks before finals. She couldn't understand why I, a full-time student working six hours a day, did not want to come to her apartment after every shift and watch a movie with the rest of our
friends. She didn't understand why I didn't want to be around my friends after a shift and why I wanted to go home to rest and do homework. “You can do your homework here,” she argued, while her baby boy screamed for more milk, and her boyfriend screamed at his video games. I wanted to be around my “friends”, I loved them, but can someone be a “friend” if they don't see each other at least once a week? Does friendship expire after not seeing one another for a specific amount of time? I wanted to prioritize a full night's rest over my friends. Did that make me a bad friend? Ashlynn seemed to think so. I ended up apologizing and said I would be there next time. I wonder how many times a week Selena and Taylor see one another.
Scrolling through the names on my phone and analyzing them, I can’t help but feel frustrated by what I was seeing before me. The Oxford Dictionary adds in their definition of a “friend” that it includes mutual affection exclusive of romantic or sexual feelings. I frown at the name of the boy who got me to sleep with him while I mourned the disintegration of my first serious relationship, claiming I could trust him with my thoughts and my body, only later to tell other friends that I came onto him. I shift my focus to another boy, one who more times than I can count tried to hit on me while drunk, and finally to the boy who would jump at the opportunity to sleep with me if my boyfriend and I broke up. If you asked him, he would claim he is my boyfriend’s friend like he is mine.
Shaking off my disappointment for the men I know, I move to the women. I stare at the name of a girl whom I have not seen more than twice since she got into a relationship almost a year ago, the friend whom I have helped move thrice who talks about me behind my back, and finally,
the girl who she talks about me to, who I had helped recover from drugs and held while she cried when her boyfriend cheated on her.
If there is a definition of a guy-friend I would say it is something like “A boy you initially view as a brother, who you trust like a brother, that is until they reveal they want to sleep with you, leading to you feeling uncomfortable wearing a swimsuit in front of them.” If I could define girl-friends it would refer to “Either the best mutual platonic sisterhood you could have, or the most isolating experience that creates insecurity, resentment and cattiness. Does not have to be mutual.”
My experience with “friends” has been a heartbreaking one filled with whiplash, but I doubt I have been a perfect friend in return. I have said the wrong things, and have been selfish and too opinionated, but I can rest easy knowing I have always tried to be at least an honest, loyal, and true friend, like Humphrey.
Swiping up and down my Snapchat contacts screen in frustration, it hits me. My definition of what constitutes a “friend” has changed since childhood, and I haven’t noticed until now. Unlike in the past, I don't have the desire to invite any of these people simply because they’re people I have attached myself to. I am tired of feeling the weight of expectations I am putting on myself and others while receiving minimal effort and maximum judgment from “friends” in return. My efforts are unappreciated, my intentions misunderstood, and while I have been allowing people all of my life to put their shoes on my neck, and accepting that this is the weight of a title like “friend,” I am denying myself other possible friendships in the name of loyalty. Or maybe it has been comfortable to stay in relationships that I don’t quite fit in.
I have known most of my friends for more than four years, some as long as six, which is enough time to have fights and disagreements with one another, but at the end of the day, we all are drawn back to the group by a bonfire kickback or a birthday, much like the one I have been mulling over. A lot of different factors could be what drew us back to one another like magnets even after nasty fights, but the most common theory among our group was that we viewed one another as “family.” I believed for a while that people you've known for a few years could hold a candle to blood relations, but my friends never paid for my tuition, never held my hand while I underwent medical procedures, they didn't even stop being friends with my ex after he cheated on me. My family did. What kept us together was familiarity, comfortability, and perhaps a trauma bond or two so that we would have people to go camping with, travel with, and celebrate birthday parties with.
It had taken me twenty-two years to learn how to be all right in becoming unattached to those who have not applied equal pressure, and for the first time in my life, feel comfortable celebrating myself with those whose intentions I do not need to question. Feeling a sense of assurance, I swipe my finger up, on the Snapchat app, erase it from my homepage, and with it, the half-baked group chat disappeared.
I decide, in the end, not to plan a big birthday party. Instead, at twenty-two, I conclude that I have to give up on needing to be celebrated, by people who are arguably not true “friends.” Instead, I will plan a small dinner for myself with my family and boyfriend and let the “friends” who give halfhearted questions about whether I am doing anything for my birthday, a gesture of meeting them at a local bar later that night, a place they would be either way, birthday or not.
Esabeau (Esa) Harrington is a senior creative writing student at Rocky Mountain College in Billings Montana. Her work often involves the relationships in her life and also includes themes surrounding mental and physical health.
